Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection

When the Digital Eclipse team at Konami boasted that they’d put a lot of care into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection I wrote it off as the standard marketing line we see around any repackaging of beloved games. However, this may be the first instance where we really have gotten a truly excellent collection of these 13 games, many of which hold up well and are exceptionally difficult and expensive to get hold of in their physical forms. Not only does Cowabunga collect some fan favorites, but tucked away in the Turtles’ lair are 2,000+ items for fans to explore, including (previously) rare pieces of concept art, soundtracks with newly revealed track names added, nostalgic magazine advertisements we ‘90s kids were bombarded with, and a ton more. There are a few sour, but important caveats, though: The online component is barely functioning at launch, and when it does work there are jittering and audio issues. And while Digital Eclipse has done an okay job with latency when playing solo, there is still a lot of room for improvement when compared to other TMNT beat-’em-ups.

TMNT Cowabunga Collection

Most things in this collection have been a treat for a fan like myself. I’ve longed to own one of those hard-to-find arcade cabinets that can go for around $700, expensive NES cartridges like TMNT 3: The Manhattan Project, which still goes for around $50 at the low end, or the NES version of TMNT: Tournament Fighters that goes for $200 if you’re lucky to find one that “cheap.

Digital Eclipse has collected everything, good and bad, all in one place

Getting to boot up any of these beloved games from my childhood without hassle is a joy. The Cowabunga Collection has some gems like the aforementioned NES version of Tournament Fighters or the arcade version of TMNT: Turtles in Time that, until now, could only be legally played if you tracked down an arcade board or cabinet from that era. Now, Digital Eclipse has collected everything, good and bad, all in one place. From the notoriously difficult TMNT on the NES to the esteemed Super Nintendo version of Turtles in Time, you have it all.

A lot of these games are similar but had slight but important enhancements that hardcore fans will likely remember. Using Turtles in Time Arcade as an example, there are some entirely new enemies not found in the home version. If that wasn’t enough, I love the sheer amount of options you have available for each game. You can turn on cheats, consult an interactive guide that will play short movies showing you how to execute an attack or reveal secrets you may have missed, rewind if you accidentally become turtle soup, create a save state to resume from anywhere or, if you’d rather just watch a near-perfect playthrough of your favorites, you can choose that and see exactly how the pros complete the entire game in record time. Sure, you can already do that on YouTube, but it’s great to have it all at your fingertips in one place.

Beyond that there’s control remapping, of course, so you can tweak things to your liking. You can toggle the screen size from the original 4:3 aspect ratio to full (which simply expands the square to fill the screen while maintaining the original 4:3 aspect ratio), or a stretched widescreen perspective if you’re a monster. Filters can be applied, including a CRT TV, Monitor, or LCD effect if you prefer. And the border can be turned on or off depending on your preference. I’m not one to use many of those filters so I usually leave them off, but it’s one of those “nice to have” things for anybody who wants that old-school experience.